Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Jacques Demy | Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort)

After the great success of Jacques Demy’s cinematic
“opera,” The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), Demy continued somewhat in
that same musical genre in his 1967 work about another French seaside harbor, The
Young Girls of Rochefort. This time, however, the work, involving three
would-be love affairs, included some spoken dialogue, and added dance,
accomplished by the American male leads, George Chakiris (as Etienne), Grover
Dale (as Bill), and Gene Kelly (as Andy Miller).

Although there’s been some criticism of
Demy’s abilities to handle the rhythmic challenges of dancing—this despite
Demy’s floating and almost always dancing camera in Umbrellas—it may
have been the rather pedestrian choreography of Norman Maen that was at fault,
particularly since Kelly (who did his own choreography) comes off far better.
But it’s also the very preposterousness of the dancing carney boys, come to
entertain in the Rochefort city square, and the almost looney behavior of the
entire towns-folk as they are represented as nearly always dancing down their
streets. Occasionally, as in On the Town even the local sailor’s dance.
The sailor central to this tale (Jacques Perrin as Maxence), a poet-painter in
his off time, presents, instead, an absolutely winning personality through
song, which isn’t hurt by Perrin’s blonde-haired-boy beauty. Here he’s a dreamer
at the heart of Demy’s vision, and is the very last to get what he desires.

Indeed, once you simply get used to the fact that Etienne and Bill will
line up with their chorus girls from time to time to create balletic-like
facing patterns, the work becomes much more fun. And it’s even more quick-witted
when the two friends lose their female partners, admitting that in their heir
perpetual trek across the country, that they’re permanent buddies. Upon meeting
the American Andy, whom the costume designer has dressed in a pink shirt, Demy
even allows the two well-known American gay dancers a joke, at the expense of
his heterosexual lead, as one them suggests they all seem to “in the pink.”

And then there are the two absolutely
beautiful and talented Garnier twins, Delphine (the always lovely Catherine
Deneuve) and Solange (Françoise Dorléac) to charm the eyes, along with the wit
and wisdom provided by their hard-working, french-frying mother, Yvonne
(Danielle Darrieux), who was once in love with a musical-store owner, Simon
Dame (Michel Piccoli), but who left him because of his ridiculous family name—which,
if they married would make her Madame Dame. Unbeknownst to her, the still love-stricken
Simon has now, after 10 years, moved from Paris to their rural town.

So,
of course, the narrative of this cockatrice will have to be taken up with the
details about with how the young sailor who dreams of a woman just like
Delphine (he’s already painted her simply out of his imagination), and Andy,
who laying eyes on Solange immediately falls in love the red haired beauty,
will finally come together, along with
finding a way to get Yvonne away from the
frying pan long enough to discover her true love Simon, whose son is the young
boy Booboo (Patrick Jeantet), whom nearly everyone in fairytale city is asked
to pick up from school, since she can never leave her café prison.

This
film, moreover, is also a road movie. The carney dancers are in town for just
few days, and the sisters are eager to join them to get to Paris where they can
compose and dance. And Demy, just for fun, also turns the whole affair into a
hometown stage-show a bit like Andy Hardy, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland
productions, as the Garnier sisters are suddenly asked to join in the
festivities (performing a piece which takes us back to Marilyn Monroe’s and
Jane Russell’s big number in Gentleman Prefer Blondes). Of course
they’re a hit!But just to be sure that
he has covered every base, the director also throws in dark Chabrol-like twist
in that same daily newspaper that gushes over the twins’ talent, as a local
friend of Yvonne’s grandfather turns out to be a murderer who has cut up his
victim into pieces and laid them out in their proper anatomical positions. All
of these clashing genres, moreover, are ladled up, as in Umbrellas, with
Michel Legrand’s highly romantic score.

In
short, The Young Ladies of Rochefort, like most of Demy’s works, is a
testament to the cinema itself. And it hardly matters that not a single moment
of it is even slightly believable. This is Hollywood through Demy’s French
lens, and you’d have to be something of ogre (as critics such as Pauline Kael
often are; her comment a few years later: “A movie like The Young Girls of
Rochefort demonstrates how even a gifted Frenchman who adores American
musicals misunderstands their conventions.”) to find fault in such a theatrical
pot-au-feu.

No, Ms. Kael, I argue, it is not that Demy
misunderstands the conventions of American musicals and other generic works,
but simply that his is a world of fantasy that even the American musical cinema
cannot quite embrace, since we still require some few elements of realism in even
the most light-footed stage adaptations. The French, who love Demy far more
than do most Americans, seem to be happy with the complete banning of realist
tropes.

Another critic, David Thomson—who can also be, at times, tart-tongued—truly
does understand Demy and his significance:

Twenty-plus years after Demy’s astonishing productivity

in the sixties and early seventies, he does not seem quite

possible. Did he really live? Have those wistful, gentle, and

melodic films been made? Or is he only an ideal director one

has dreamed? Already, the young film-goers do not know his

name. It is more plausible as legend than as film fact that someone

made movies in which all the dialogue was
sung…. It is already

a
more forlorn hope than likelihood that anyone would make

pictures as graceful and humane as those of Max Ophuls, as

poised between speech and music as Stephen Sondheim. It may

be more comfortable in this age of dread-ridden movies to

believe Demy never existed.

I
haven’t yet seen the new, yet-to-open American film musical, La-La Land,
but it sounds like maybe, thankfully, Demy has finally been rediscovered. We
need him more than ever in these dark days.